A man was released from prison only to be detained by ICE — now he’s in the hospital with COVID-19

Alma Rosa Perez-Aguirre cried all the way back to Longmont from the Sterling Correctional Facility. She had left Boulder County around 5 a.m. on May 15 with her daughter and niece, driving more than 120 miles to pick up her brother Oscar Perez-Aguirre upon his release. Oscar had called Alma the day before, elated. At 57 years old, with hypertension and an enlarged heart, he was eligible for release due to a higher risk of severe illness associated with COVID-19, he told her. He had tested negative and was told he would be let go the following morning. He had been given all the paperwork and everything, he said.

“We drove all the way to Sterling and missed a day of work,” Alma tells Boulder Weekly through an interpreter more than a week later. “We were so excited to be able to pick him up and to see him.”

As they waited with other families by a big red sign in the parking lot, several men were released, but Oscar wasn’t one of them. A little while later, Alma says, a guard came over and said: “Oscar’s not going to be released to you all; Immigration took him into custody.”

She felt helpless. The tears on the way home were part frustration at her own impotence.

It wasn’t until sometime later that day or the next — it’s all sort of a blur to Alma — that she finally heard from Oscar. He was being held in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contract facility in Aurora, operated by the private prison corporation GEO Group, Inc. What’s more, he was in a medical unit, he told his sister. He had been transferred with a fever, he said. The obvious concern was that somewhere along the way he had been exposed to the coronavirus. Alma talked to him again on Sunday night, and became even more worried.

“My concern is really for his health,” Alma says, “and that was the reason we contracted a lawyer was to make sure that he didn’t die, to make sure that he didn’t fall through the cracks.”

For several days, immigration lawyer Henry Hollithron says he was unable to get any information from ICE or GEO about Oscar, let alone speak to his client. As late as Wednesday, May 20, he was told Oscar was still being held in medical quarantine at the facility.

“It has been very frustrating to try to communicate with them to have this complete denial of access to counsel so that we could know what was going on,” Hollithron says.

On Thursday, May 21, Hollithron was told his client “had been located at University Hospital.” But it wasn’t until Hollithron talked to Oscar himself that the family found out he had tested positive for COVID-19.

ICE won’t confirm that Oscar is one of two cases at the Aurora facility that the agency announced on Wednesday, May 20. Although an ICE official did say one of the cases is a 57-year-old from Mexico who is hospitalized. The other is a 35-year-old man from El Salvador who is still at the GEO facility. In addition to the two detainees, there is currently one employee with a lab-confirmed case of COVID-19, according to the Tri-County Health Department. Tri-County Health says all three cases are unrelated, and exposure in all three cases occurred outside of the GEO facility.

Across the country, more than 1,300 immigrants in ICE custody have tested positive for the disease in over 50 facilities. According to media reports, there have been at least two people to die of complications related to COVID-19 while being held in ICE custody. Local and national elected leaders, medical professionals and immigration advocates have long worried that the coronavirus could spread quickly among people being held in ICE detention, calling for mass releases, especially for those deemed especially vulnerable by the Centers for Disease Control.